“Global shipments of smartphones shrank 3 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier in the market’s first year-on-year contraction on record…reflecting growing strains on the industry.” Q1 shipments dropped to 334.6 million devices from 345 million in 2015.

With no major changes resulting at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), “it’s easy to overlook the seismic shifts going on just beneath the surface that will impact policy and markets for the remainder of 2016.” The “astounding number of mixed signals and conflicting messages” emanating from Fed speakers of late is one clue to the divisions on the committee and the uncertainty regarding the U.S. economy.

“For years now, people have been talking about the insulated world of the top 1 percent of Americans, but the top 20 percent of the income distribution is also steadily separating itself—by geography and by education as well as by income.” Their isolation from the lower 80 percent “is changing the American social order and the American political system, creating a self-perpetuating class at the top, which is ever more difficult to break into.”

“With the BoJ dabbling in negative interest rates, JGB yields have gotten compressed to a maximum of 0.4 percent, and that’s at a maturity of 40 years. It’s as though Japanese financial institutions are sitting on a tightly wound spring. Even a small increase in the yield — a little uncoiling — could send the whole edifice flying, a risk Janus Capital’s Bill Gross cites as an example of ‘global monetary lunacy.’”

In the UK, President Obama and others appear to be taking the wind out of the sails of the Brexit supporters. But the leave campaign is also struggling with the logic behind their own position. The “central flaw that bedevils the Leave campaign: it refuses to define what the world outside the EU looks like. Instead, it is asking the British people to take a leap in the dark.”

“Rate announcements by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan will loom large this coming week as investors consider the alternate reality of negative interest rates. Meanwhile, key economic indicators for onetime BRIC stars Russia and Brazil will arrive as each suffers from the weight of low oil prices and Brazil deals with domestic political intrigue surrounding the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.”

With a dominant European market share, Google has come under fire from the European Commission. Google deserves to profit from its acumen, but this “has to be balanced against the need to inspire innovations that might complement Android or Google Search—or even displace them. It is now up to Google to demonstrate that its mobile strategy does not harm competition, and thus consumers.”

During his visit to London, President Obama has been somewhat controversially urging the British to remain in the EU. “British leadership in the world is very much at stake. And because it really is a matter of profound, bipartisan, long-term U.S. interest that Britain remain a European power and thus a world power, Obama is right to take the risk and say so.”

“For Europe to grow faster, the political class will eventually have to stop looking to the ECB as the growth engine of first and last resort.” On Thursday, Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, was unusually blunt in his criticism of other European politicians because they “have used the relief of low interest rates as an excuse not to do reforms.”

“Transportation and logistics networks brought to a standstill by the recent earthquakes in Kyushu are starting to return to life, while utilities are striving to restore such crucial services as electricity and gas.” Kumamoto Airport has partially reopened and the shinkansen resumed service to Kagoshima, but nearly 100,000 households still lack running water and gas. In contrast, electricity has been restored to all but 6,500 households.